How Much is a Corbyn?

cells

antrobus wrote: »

Dunno. How much does "a nuke" cost compared to "multiple high accuracy guided missiles"?

if the aim is to "carpet bomb" its definitely cheaper and more effective

but if the aim is to precision bomb it probably is not.

And now with high value targets precision bombing would be a very effective deterrent. For example if japan and china went to war, china could nuke japan but japan could precision bomb targets like the three gorges dam and achieve huge economic damage (>$100B i would guess) and kill hundreds of thousands in the process as well.

so is a nuke a bigger deterrent than precision bombs?

probably not, but it is if you dont have precision tech, like in ww2 or like north korea today

cells

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Nukes were designed to end wars, not to fight them. As a weapon so terrible nothing could stand against it.

Nukes then morphed into a part of strategic defence for countries which hold them. No nation will start a conventional war against a nuclear armed opponent today. As that war cannot be won.

And no nuclear armed nation will launch a first strike against another nuclear armed nation, as the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine guarantees there cannot be a winner.

Nuclear weapons have done more to prevent a major global war for the last 70 years than just about anything else.

didn't stop the Falklands war against nuclear Britain did it?

it made sense in ww2 when economies were largely independent and bombing was !!!! and there wasn't so much high value targets.

today under what conditions do you think it might be worthwhile for china to nuke japan when japan can take out 500 Chinese power stations/dams/nukes/airports/bridges/train-stations/etc and cause $10 trillion in damage and 50 million dead chinese without a nuke?

if conventional weapons can cause so much economic damage and dead why do you need nukes?

antrobus

cells wrote: »

fairly cheap to mass produce by most accounts (at least for the Americans and USSR they were)...

What missile systems are you talking about? It doesn't take all that much technical jiggery pockery to switch payloads on a missile. Tomahawks (aka cruise missiles) have been deployed with both nuclear and conventional warheads, the Yanks were going to stick conventional warheads on a Trident.

If you are questioning nuclear capability on the grounds that it is a "needless cost" and that you can achieve the same ends by launching 'multiple high accuracy guided missiles', how is it going to be any cheaper if you are using the same missiles, but more of them, because they don't give as big a bang?

antrobus

cells wrote: »

...today under what conditions do you think it might be worthwhile for china to nuke japan when japan can take out 500 Chinese power stations/dams/nukes/airports/bridges/train-stations/etc and cause $10 trillion in damage and 50 million dead chinese without a nuke?....

I don't think Japan has any offensive missile capabilities. In fact I don't think Japan has much in the way of offensive capabilities at all. I doubt that Japan could "take out" much of anything in China. Japan relies on the USA for that sort of thing.:)

cells

antrobus wrote: »

What missile systems are you talking about? It doesn't take all that much technical jiggery pockery to switch payloads on a missile. Tomahawks (aka cruise missiles) have been deployed with both nuclear and conventional warheads, the Yanks were going to stick conventional warheads on a Trident.

If you are questioning nuclear capability on the grounds that it is a "needless cost" and that you can achieve the same ends by launching 'multiple high accuracy guided missiles', how is it going to be any cheaper if you are using the same missiles, but more of them, because they don't give as big a bang?

i don't think you will need to use either because they are both a big enough deterrent.

in the case of Japan, she could probably take out every major dam in China with conventional missiles. You would need probably just as many nukes to do that as dams are often far apart. So Japan with no nukes still has the capability to kill millions of chinese and to cause trillions of dollars worth of damage.


The actual missiles probably cost nothing in the scheme of things. Its running the systems to allow an active deployment and use of the weapons that probably is the major cost and also resource drain (eg personnel R&D etc). And no nuclear power just keeps nukes they keep conventional too. So its not a choice of convention or nuke, its a choice of just conventional or conventional plus nukes in which case the latter is more expensive as its simply more.

cells

antrobus wrote: »

I don't think Japan has any offensive missile capabilities. In fact I don't think Japan has much in the way of offensive capabilities at all. I doubt that Japan could "take out" much of anything in China. Japan relies on the USA for that sort of thing.:)

well in that case they would do better to develop conventional missile attack capabilities than to develop nukes, if their concern is being attacked by foreign nations

---

Also with two aircraft carriers 16 subs 40 destroyers and over 500 jets they surely have the capability to take out a few dams?

chewmylegoff

cells wrote: »

well in that case they would do better to develop conventional missile attack capabilities than to develop nukes, if their concern is being attacked by foreign nations

---

Also with two aircraft carriers 16 subs 40 destroyers and over 500 jets they surely have the capability to take out a few dams?

In order to answer this question we need to know if the jets can carry bouncing bombs and whether they are equipped with those y-shaped bomb aimer thingies.

martinsurrey

cells wrote: »

well in that case they would do better to develop conventional missile attack capabilities than to develop nukes, if their concern is being attacked by foreign nations

---

Also with two aircraft carriers 16 subs 40 destroyers and over 500 jets they surely have the capability to take out a few dams?

a few dams? China would be annoyed but not out of the fight.

I think people vastly overestimate conventional weapons, or vastly underestimate nuclear.

Chinas ICBM's have a range of 6k KM and carry a 3000kg bomb.

The nuke they carry has a yield of 3,300,000,000 kg of TNT

To replace 1 nuke with conventional weapons you would be looking at firing about 1.1 MILLION conventional warhead ICBM's.

A modern strike jet can carry about 12,000kg of weapons (so lets assume they are pure explosives), that means you would need 250,000 fully loaded strike aircraft to replace a single nuke.

To put this into perspective, the Blitz on London totalled about 20,000 tonnes of high explosives dropped, which is about 1/165th of a single low yield nuke.

Nukes are about making sure that no one wants to fight you, as you can, without huge amounts of infrastructure, or man power lay waste to their entire nation.

If you understand the truly terrifying nature of nuclear warfare, you wouldn't try and compare it to conventional, there is nothing known to man to replace the destructive threat of 200 nukes (which is what China could put down on Japan if it needed to, and what the UK holds).

ruggedtoast

Generali wrote: »

Eff me. If that's the intellectual support for Corbynism then the Labour party is in more trouble than I feared. For example:



Let's look at these 'benefits'. Higher inflation raises costs on both businesses and consumers, reducing GDP and thus the ability to service debts. A weaker pound further increases inflation and reduces spending capacity, impoverishing domestic consumers.

I bet he's one of those people that thinks a trade surplus is some macho show of economic brilliance rather than simply reflecting the fact that your people don't have either the confidence or the incomes to buy the stuff they're making.

I heard him on the radio the other day and thought he came across very well. One of his strengths is that he can explain his theories in a way that as a lay person I could understand.

I think this is something that free market capitalism is going to have to learn to do.

We had years of being told that the masters of the universe were doing all this vital stuff that was too complicated for ordinary people to understand or interfere with, and them becoming obscenely wealthy at the same time was just a happy coincidence.

Then it turned out that they apparently knew nothing and made enormous losses that for some reason ordinary tax payers have had to cover. But this doesn't seem to have affected their obscene richness in any noticeable way.

I might be off on that but thats basically what ordinary people think now, and executives in RBS and Barclays only get one vote the same as the people cleaning their offices on zero hour contracts. Which is why Jeremy Corbyn is suddenly proving so wildly popular.

After years of being told there is no alternative to free market capitalism and that free market capitalism is too clever for people to understand; there suddenly seems to be an alternative and the people offering is are actually able to explain it convincingly.

I am quite happy to listen to Yvette Cooper et al's measured and reasonable rebuttal to Corbynomics. But so far they don't appear to have one. I suspect free market capitalism is too clever for them to understand too, so like most politicians they just worship it like some kind of idol that has to be obeyed because if they don't the sun won't come up in the morning and everyone will have to sacrifice their first born.

princeofpounds

I think people vastly overestimate conventional weapons, or vastly underestimate nuclear.

Bears repeating.

if conventional weapons can cause so much economic damage and dead why do you need nukes?

Conventional weapons can cause a lot of damage. But they cannot destroy an entire civilisation.


Personally, I am ambivalent about nuclear weapons. I do agree that they have prevented many open wars (although not low grade and proxy conflicts).


But I also think that it remains a risk having a weapon where one mistake would be terminal. That's a kind of risk that's not easy for humans to ever judge. It only takes one lunatic in charge of countries like Pakistan, North Korea, soon Iran and Saudi, let alone the UK, US, France, China or Russia for things to go wrong.


Mind you, I don't think we have a better option yet.


And I also agree that the heat of the SNP stance against trident is quite weird. I think it's more a reflection of their leftist roots than their nationalist ones, possibly also just seen as a useful bargaining chip.